The typical enterprise technology landscape today is characterized by the distributed nature of its information systems and the heterogeneity of its technologies. Following decades of evolution and innovation, it is common to see “best-of-breed” packaged applications, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, SRM, PLM, etc., home-grown systems, and legacy applications, each with numerous interfaces interconnecting them. In these distributed and complex environments, the act of processing a typical transaction spans numerous applications and technological boundaries, often rendering the enterprise incapable of understanding execution paths for the transactions as well as their logical and technical interdependencies. Without the requisite knowledge of how the transactions are executed, the enterprise is severely limited in its ability to monitor transactions and to detect and remedy bottlenecks, latencies, and points-of-failure.
Enterprise organizations therefore seek to increase the visibility of their automated business transactions as they see a direct correlation between transaction visibility and business performance. Achieving a high-degree of visibility enables the enterprise to improve customer service, to monitor transaction performance and health, to optimize the business logic, and to implement efficient solutions to problems as they arise.
US Patent Publication 2005/0192894 to Klein et al, discloses a method for reconstructing instances of transactions using predefined transaction information by correlating the text between pairs of the messages in the instance of the transaction.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,003,781 to Blackwell et al discloses a method and system for monitoring a distributed data processing system. Generated Application Program Interface (API) calls are examined to determine if a particular API call meets predetermined API call criteria. If a particular API call meets the predetermined API call criteria, a portion of the content of the API call is stored as a stored event. Stored events are processed to identify logically correlated events, such as those associated with a particular business transaction. Stored API call content data is displayed for the logically correlated events.
US Patent Publication 20060015512 to Alon et al discloses an apparatus for monitoring a selected tier in a multi-tier computing environment. The apparatus includes a context agent and a dynamic tier extension. The context agent is associated with a selected tier, and is coupled with other context agents, each of which is associated with a respective tier. The dynamic tier extension is coupled with the context agent and with specific predetermined points of the selected tier, such as at least a request entry port of the selected tier. The dynamic tier extension monitors request traffic passing through the selected tier, the monitored request traffic including at least one entering request received at a request entry port from an adjacent tier. The dynamic tier extension identifies each request in the monitored request traffic and sends at least the request identifier to the context agent. The context agent also receives information relating to the request context of the entering request from the context agent associated with the adjacent tier. The context agent associates the information relating to the request context of the entering request with the entering request, in accordance with the received request identifier.